Not only did this approach mean that the extension needed to be reinstalled on every daily or monthly update of VS Code, it opened up to a new class of issues which we could not easily diagnose or fix, since the core product was being modified after we shipped it. Without a proper extension mechanism, Roberto was forced to patch the installed sources in order to make the vscode-icons extension work properly. It would be impossible to come up with a single set of icons that everyone agreed upon.

It was clear from the start that we needed to make icon theming an extension point to VS Code. 200 thumbs up said we needed to listen to this feedback and look at this again. The 10 people on the VS Code team at that time hardly constituted a statistically significant data set. With over 200K downloads, 170 reviews, and a 5 star rating, Roberto Huertas' vscode-icons extension had become the 5th most popular extension in the Marketplace.Number 9 with almost 2500 votes on the recently retired User Voice list.PR 3200 forced us to have the discussion again, but given our '1.0' deliverables and other feature requests (such as Tabs), we had to push out the conversation.Īs we planned the August 2016 release, many of the top feature requests had been addressed and support for icons bubbled to the top: We left in the icon implementation in case we changed our minds in the future, but we never turned it on.įast forward to February 2016. We worried about maintaining 100+ icons and keeping them in sync with the Visual Studio IDE. To us, icons felt heavy and provided little value. The team loved the simple, clean look of an icon-less tree.

When we started work on the 'Monaco' editor, icons in the Explorer didn't make the cut for a lightweight editor. was an intern in Zurich lab and spent a couple of hours hacking in a basic set of icons because he wanted to differentiate between files and folders when quickly glancing at the tree. These words all describe the first time we added icons to the File Explorer tree in VS Code, back in 2014.

Node.js Development with Visual Studio Code and Azure.

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